The gold rush

Long time, no post. My fan(s) are probably thinking I forgot all about this blog, that my creative juices have run dry. No fear, I'm back. Back to give you a truthful, if somewhat fabled, account of my last romance.

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I was hiding out in a tumbledown shack in the Appalachian Mountains, after the botched train job in Amarillo. Joe had spilled the beans to the Marshals, so I thought it wise to lay low for a while, let the heat cool off a bit. But one morning I look out my window and who should I see but old Flanaghan, riding hard up the trail. I give him a dram of whisky, let him catch his breath, and he tells me there's gold to be dug in California. He's heard it from Trey Wallace, who's already on his way westward. It's a race. Everybody's in a rush to get their hands on the biggest nugget they can find, before it's too late. No time to lose, then. I saddle my pony, put on my spurs (which, by the way, I've earned the hard way) and gallop off into a sunset full of promise.

I ride long and hard, on an empty stomach and a dry canteen. I can hear the coyotes howling in the chilly night, from inside my little tent in the prairie. But I'll be damned if I let them get me! Come closer if you dare, you dirty varmint! It's your fangs against my Colt. No? You'd rather give my six-shot and me a wide berth? Wise choice, if I may say so.

So, I can't say how many times I've seen the sun come up and go down, and not a soul in sight, when I finally come across a wagon with a broken wheel. Sat next to it there's the most beautiful gal I've ever laid eyes on. She used to travel around with her man, a card cheat I know by name, cause once he got in a wrangle with Pat Kilkenny over a poker game. One day the little weasel ran into someone a little more determined than Pat to hold on to his dollars, who upped the ante with some hot lead. Since then, the girl had been on her own, making ends meet and trying to stay out of trouble. But then this sheriff sees a new face in town and remembers she used to be with a scumbag who owes money to half of Oklahoma. The rest is pretty easy to figure out: she steals a wagon and makes a lucky escape, with the sheriff, the deputy and a little posse of creditors at her heels. I don't need to ask her why she doesn't just resume her getaway on horseback: there must be something worth A LOT in that wagon. I fix the wheel and we decide to keep company for a while, heading West.

An outlaw's life is rough and lonely, and I don't mind associating with a lady, especially a peach like this one. But it's always like that: you think you can handle yourself 'cause after all you've done the law still can't get a bead on you, and a rope round your neck, and the next thing you know you're head over heels over a damsel in distress. So when we get to the river on a starry night, with the moon reflecting on the surface of the calm water, I ask her to come with me. Let's coast this river, I say, it'll take us West and away from the past. We can live off the fish it's teeming with, and find some shade in the vegetation by its banks. She says she's not sure, and walks off to go and pick a few daisies. Damn, we didn't realize this was Comanche territory! They come down on us from every direction, yowling, firing arrows. She runs to the wagon, I make a beeline for my gun. The savages are raining arrows on me, so I hide behind a rock. We're split. Damn, the Injuns are circling the wagon! I can't shoot them, I could hit the girl. We're stuck here. All we can do is sit tight and pray for the cavalry to come. They always come, don't they?

Don't rain on my parade

Guess who's back? No, not Eminem. He's an inordinately rich young man who sings about the hardships of working class life and admittedly hates his own mother. His credibility and authoritativeness are thus next to nil. I, on the other hand, am a cretin with no desire to pass myself off as anything different. You can take me at face value. And that has to count for something, in this world of constant camouflage and deceit.

I know at least one of my readers (I'm optimistically assuming that I have more than one...) has been clamouring for more of the delirious nonsense I provide with this blog, so here goes. 

I've been wondering what I was going to write about, while rifling a bag of crisps for the last morsel of high-fat, artery-clogging deliciousness, and finally it came to me. I read something on Facebook, just a random comment, nothing particularly clever or insightful. And that's exactly the beauty of social networks: they bring back common sense in human interaction. While the mainstream media pump us full of useless information and preposterous points of view, a conversation on Facebook is very likely to stay sane and relevant to people's experience and day-to-day reality. 

June 2 is a national holiday in Italy. We call it "Festa della Repubblica", because on that day in 1946 the Italian people decided with a referendum that post-fascist Italy was to be a republic, not a kingdom, as it had been up to that point. It is customary to celebrate this day with a military parade. However, in the past few weeks Northern Italy has been hit hard by two earthquakes, which have left thousands of people homeless or unemployed. In the current circumstances, with the state coffers seriously depleted by the financial crisis we are going through, it seemed natural to a lot of people that the parade should be called off, and the funds meant for it used to relieve the suffering of the people affected by the calamity. Petitions were made and sent to the President of the Republic, the Italian head of state (though not the head of the government, as we have a parlamentary system). The President, a senescent snob whose complete disregard for common people's ideas and feelings is only surpassed by his love of pompous rhetoric, said no. The parade holds a particular symbolic value, apparently. 

And now, for some of the common sense I mentioned above. Regardless of one's cultural background and philosophical convictions, nobody in 2012 is entertained or cheered by watching soldiers march down a street. Not in this country, at least. If you're looking for an Italian military victory of some significance, you need to go back to World War I, when we lost about a million people for just over the acreage of a golf course. Well, yes, we had the Roman Empire. Since then, people of all sorts of creed, colour and geographical provenance have invaded the Italian peninsula, pillaged our cities, towns and villages, drunk our wine and had their way with our women. Mussolini looked pretty smug when he thrust his chest out, promising we would break Greece's back; trouble is, you need firearms in modern warfare, and they're not much use if they backfire in your face half the time. Even if we consider the comic potential of such inefficient armed forces, you must convene that spending precious resources, much needed elsewhere, on a parade is a questionable choice, when I can log on to Youtube and tank up on Monty Python for nothing.

So, where is the symbolic value our President stressed in his statement? Exactly in the futility of the parade itself. Europe is changing, and not for the better. We need to get accustomed to the bitter taste of the medicine we will be taking over the next few decades. "You peasants toe the line, and don't you dare question our decisions. We're going to have our parade, like it or lump it". That's what the old fart's saying. Earthquake victims can wait. Now watch our brave boys march, and sing the anthem. Or don't. But I really hope you won't have the temerity to suggest what we should do with your taxes. Fine, I get it, you're pissed off. Well, vent your anger on Facebook, or maybe a blog. Just stay off my pretty little soldiers. Don't rain on my parade. 

Misanthropist, sometimes

Long time no post. So, duly scolded by one who is likely to be my only reader (but the sapience of whom compensates for the lack of abundance), I set off to compile another succulent compendium of sapid trivialities; another window opens up on the landscape of human abhorrence.

In spite of the current month, it's quite cold in Nipples. Temperatures are well below seasonal average. It's a Friday night, but in my state of virtual unemployment it doesn't really make a difference what day it is. The considerable incentive to go out one feels after a week's worth of multifarious degradation at the office is presently absent from my life, so Friday isn't really Friday. I'm staying in. No point in leaving the flat to catch my death in that cold, damp, miserable encore of winter that nobody asked for. God, if you're really there, if the world is actually 5,000 years old and you put dinosaur fossils there just to test our faith, I beseech thee: give me some springtime and I'll convert to your balmy cult. I'll slip on a burlap sack and roam the dusty streets of Galilea preaching the second coming of your first born child. Or give me another day like today and I'll desecrate a church by the act of defecation, burn it to the ground in the name of the Prince of Darkness, and celebrate its destruction by committing impure acts with a not-necessarily-consenting chicken, while my facial features contort in the conjoined evil pleasures of blasphemy and cross-species fornication.

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Actually, I have been out. I've had a few beers, a few laughs, and a late night snack. Late night snacks are one of my favourite things in life. But that is completely beside the point. This post is supposed to be about misanthropy; therefore, let us not be sidetracked by my accidentally and temporarily renewed faith in the human race: our species is going down the toilet, it's plain to see. 

This is particularly obvious when we look at our friends, with all their faults and foibles. Acquaintances are even better in that respect, because you hang out with them often enough to notice how flawed they are, but you're not close enough for your judgement to be tempered by benevolence. Some of my acquaintances, for example, are disgustingly sectarian, and their double standards are so blatant that I find myself constantly grappling with the dilemma of whether they are, as simple folk say, "for real". Sadly, I must invariably come to the conclusion that they are. But sectarianism is only one particular vice, out of the many that I could have picked. You've got your scroungers, your opportunists, your con artists of romance; people who only give you a ring when they want something from you, and people who apparently want something from you, but it's not quite clear what; women who inundate Facebook with their bitter reflections on how much they've been hurt by insensitive men, and then embark on the solemn, holy quest of having sexual intercourse with every last bastard on the face of the earth, only so that they can later complain about them and perpetuate the unbreakable cycle of shag and nag. 

Naples is playing tonight. After three consecutive defeats I'm ready and willing to burn the chairman of the club in effigy, since I don't think it would be possible to get to him in person. I hope I won't have to. Bonfires aren't that common round these parts, and the police don't take kindly to such unusual behaviour. Burning people in effigy is, within the beautifully childish, endearingly simplified mindset of the average law enforcer, something ragheads do. Police brutality, religious intolerance and a losing streak, three more reasons to be disappointed in the human race.

To top it all off, I've got a headache. I took a tablet but it didn't do any good. The inefficacy of many pharmaceutical products: yet another item in my list of things to hate my congeners for. I could go on like this  ad libitum, as the accomplished musician will say. But I will stop here, because, as they say in my colourful, somewhat bawdy local dialect, m'aggio rutto 'o cazzo. Literally, it means I've broken my penis. I'm fed up with this. I think I'm going to look at some naked women: one the very few things that redeem this epic evolutionary fail called mankind.

The pursuit of happiness

It's the very foundation of contemporary western civilization, is it not? Writers, poets, thinkers, statesmen have devoted a vast deal of time and effort to this crucial topic, and written about it accordingly. The pursuit of happiness: how noble and inspired this phrase sounds to our ears. Unfortunately, nobody's ever bothered to mention how fast the bastard can go. One should make provision for a pursuit, especially if one's quarry is comparable to a cheetah that's had a fistful of chilli peppers shoved up its rectum.

The speed at which happiness flees our hopes and desires would be enough to make the chase an arduous one; what makes it nearly impossible is the fact that, by the time the poor straggler has finally managed to identify the thing that swished past as his or her happiness, the bitch turns a corner and disappears from sight. Choices. Dilemmas. Do I go left or right? If I make the wrong decision I'll never catch up with the elusive roadrunner on which my fulfilment depends.

Invariably, you go the other way, like a goalkeeper trying to save a penalty kicked by Diego Armando Maradona. I mean, honestly, what chance did you have in the first place? Do you think happiness will stop, or at least slow down while you try to figure out where you went wrong? Well, it won't. Wiley as you may be, and as many gadgets you order from Acme, your attempts will result in utter and humiliating defeat. You'll drag your scraggy arse back to the headquarters of squalor you call home and drink yourself to sleep, but not before emitting a prolonged series of mournful, heart-rending wails, until the banshees come and tell you to fecking knock it off and let them get some sleep.

Jaysus, Joseph and Mary! Stop whoining already! I can't take it anymore!

So, what options have you got left? I remember a Chinese proverb saying something to the effect that if you wait by a river, sooner or later your enemy's corpse is bound to float by. Well, Asian people are clever, aren't they? There must be some truth in that. So, I think a plan may be hatching here...

Me, a drinking buddy and an inordinate amount of alcohol. A river. A long wait. And, eventually, the corpse of my happiness, to be taunted and vilified at my leisure.

Let the forgotten leper out of the slumber room of consciousness

Let's pick up where we left off: a leper with halitosis. Of course, the major downside to being a leper would not be bad breath, as much as the inability to hold on to your body parts. I laugh at those emo kids, with their cultivated dysfunctionality and overindulgent sensitivity; when you have leprosy, you literally fall to pieces.
One of the good things about a post on leprosy is that you're very unlikely to offend anyone. According to Wikipedia, the disease is practically non-existent in contemporary Europe.

Now, as is often the case with unpleasant things we leave behind, leprosy is no longer a popular subject of conversation among educated, well-bread people. We'd rather talk about  the Yen exchange rate or the bailout plan to save the fattest banker in the world from having to give up one or two of his 127 mansions in a fiscal paradise as yet uncharted and unknown to the rabble. We are losing the enormous comic and narrative potential of leprosy.

Now, I don't think any child in the western world has grown up without watching, at least once but more probably several times, The Wizard of Oz. We loved and sympathised with the scarecrow in need of a brain, the tin man who would not resign to living without a heart, and the lion man who finally found his courage through comradeship. What was missing from the mix was clearly a leper.

Just picture it: the poor fellow would scatter bits of skin, fingernails and a few phalanxes all along the Yelllow Brick Road, happily sauntering and singing along with Dorothy and the others. The particular reason he's travelling to the Emerald City is that he needs some glue, for obvious reasons. "Mr Leper!" the tin man would call out "you dropped your left pinky! Pick it up at once, before the Wicked Witch of the West swoops down on her broom and gets away with it!" Yeah, I'd like to see the ugly old bitch get within a twenty meter radius of a leper. Of course Dorothy and her friends would be exposed to contagion themselves, but the Wizard is bound to have a cure. So, with Mr Leper by her side, Dorothy's journey would be a walk in the park. Obviously, the revolting man would have a song of his own. I think I know what the lyrics might be. If you remember the tune to "If I only had a brain" you can give it a go:

Well, I hate to be imposing,
but I am decomposing,
that's why my heart is blue...
it would be so much better
if I stopped being a shedder
if I only had some glue.

All the limbs you take for granted
I struggle to keep planted
I'm rotting through and through
life could be so fantastic
with a few drops of Bostik
if I only had some glue...

A word of introduction

Let's get one thing straight, right from the start: this is a place for me to rant. If you expect me to make sense and stick to any one subject thoughout an entire post, or indeed an entire paragraph, you'll be sorely disappointed. Who am I? An oddity. An outcast. A religious fundamentalist who was supposed to bomb the American Embassy and ended up in a strip club by mistake. Now, before you jump the gun and report me to the FBI or something, that was a metaphor.

I was born in Naples - also known as Nipples after being thus dubbed on an infamous balcony overlooking it - thirty-eight years ago. Fate could not have been more wrong. If there's something I'm ill-suited for is being an Italian. That and holding on to a job. Or a woman. But I digress (oh, how I love that phrase!). I was saying I'm not cut out for the unrewarding task of being an Italian. If it were up to me, I'd be born again in Sheffield, at the start of the XIX century. I'd be the son of an extremely progressive industrialist and his feminist wife. I would invest my time and money into one of those socialist experiments where you would take a thousand or so people and put them on a remote island, telling them to co-exist in harmony and shit. I would prove the world that I'm right, and reap my well-deserved harvest of accolades and admiration. In the evenings, I would drink absynth and smoke opium, or have hashish jam doughnuts especially made for me, and dunk them in absynth. I would then drift into a light, troubled sleep, and upon rousing from it I would write obscure poems in French, for which people would call me a genius. Then, just before I get too far down the road to perdition and die of syphilis in a mental asylum, I would collect a handkerchief dropped by a fair damsel, and after an adequately long period of courtship marry her and have her children. If she has no children to give me, we could even make some. I'd give up the opium and the funny doughnuts, but treat myself to the odd glass of absynth when my artist friends came round.

Right, so much for reveries. This, alas, is not the ninteenth century, and I'm not in Sheffield. Now that I think of it, London would probably have been better. Anyway, here I am in Nipples, in the godforsaken 21st century, in a dead-end job with no prospects, and the social life of a leper with halitosis. Someone's got to pay for that. If you still want to read this, you are walking into trouble.

Now, you may ask, why the rear window? Because the future, as I see it, is always coming through the back. A bit like a burglar. It sneaks up on you. Partly, this is due to the fact that most change is bad, and is thrust upon you by other people, who had much rather you didn't realise what they're doing to you. And also because of our inability, or reluctance, to face up to change. That's why you need to watch the back entrance. I'm very much in tune with myself. Not that it's done me much good, mind you. I just don't see why people spend good money on therapy. It's like taking your car to a garage and being told exactly what is wrong with it, but that ufortunately it can't be fixed. You gain wisdom, maybe you function slightly better, but you don't get any happier. There's only one thing that makes me happier, or at least less miserable: ranting. That and drinking like there's no tomorrow. But I'm getting old, like that old Canadian singer who went looking for a heart of gold, and I fear my days of carousing glory might be behind me. So, rant shall I.

Now, if you're still reading this unbelievable tripe, and if your bottom is still attached to your spinal cord and has not come off out of sheer boredom, you may also ask: why rant in English? 2 reasons:

1) Escapism. I'm the son of an industrialist from the nineteenth century, remember?

2) I need to perfect my English, at your expense. I need to be really good at something, while the rest of my life is mired in mediocrity and wasted on trivial pursuits and cheap thrills.

3) It's not two reasons, it's actually three. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our weapons are fear and suprise... fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency etc.
If you didn't get that, don't you dare continue reading. Go and revise right now. Now, the third reason is that English speakers need to get a different perspective on what's going on in this part of the world. We're not a bunch of lazy defaulters, overdependent on the public sector and hopelessly corrupt. Not all of us, anyway. So when the Panzers start rolling in because we can't pay off our national debt, please don't turn the other way. We'll repay you, one way or another. Just not in euros, maybe. But anyway, you'll have our gratitude. And maybe a few thousand tons of free mozzarella. So it's me against virtually the entirety ef English language media and a mountain range of prejudice. Talk about an uphill struggle.

There's one more reason why I decided to write in English, but it's not listed because I couldn't be arsed to go back and edit this bastard again. There are some English words I just love. "Bollocks" springs to mind. I like the sound of it, how it fills up your mouth when you say it. I could never use it during my classes or examinations. So bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. There should be a student's book called "Bollocks to your First Certificate" or something like that. "Advanced bollocks in English". "Certificate of Proficiency in bollocks". Cambridge examiners should be sporting a shamelessly hairy, majestic pair of testicles at all times during assessments, in celebration of this beautiful lexeme. As for myself, I've already started to celebrate.I challenge anyone to maintain that this was not a truckload of sweaty, smelly, sweltering bollocks.